Frequently, early career writers are advised to complete Twine projects in order to learn their craft (as I have advised writers myself). However, interactive fiction text-based projects of this kind often lean heavily into long paragraphs of flowing prose writing in a manner which is utterly unlike the majority of paid game writing positions (as I will explain shortly).-Some- samples from such projects can be great in portfolios; they're great for getting your name out there; they're great for learning your craft; and they're great, above all, for creating interesting projects, but most people will need to work on more than this to get bigger gigs. 

made this mistake early in my career, and have seen others make it since. I would really advise against sending short stories as part of most game writing portfolio PDFs. They are rarely relevant for the majority of game jobs, and even when the job is primarily text-oriented, there are still better ways of demonstrating your skills. Even if the short story is great, a) the sheer volume of applications most jobs receive will mean your brilliance will probably never actually get read due to its length, and b) it will suggest you don't have sufficient game-specific samples to demonstrate your writing (in which case, this raises the question: why not?

You want your game writing portfolio to be readable and easily followable - the more branches present in your sample and the more ways the story can progress, the harder-to-read it will be. This might also raise another problem in the mind of your potential employer: a sense that you might be naturally inclined to branch stories in a manner that might cost the studio a huge amount of time, resources, and money to achieve. The truth is that the majority of branching dialogue conversations exist in games to allow the player to determine their character's personality as opposed to altering the story in huge directions (although some such choices do). Being able to show you're comfortable with this, and having small branches that join up to the same critical path in conversations, is a useful skill, as I describe in my advice below.

By this, I mean many writers will feature dialogue which might be better suited to an independent art-house film than the majority of paid video game gigs. This does NOT mean you shouldn't try hard and have great writing in your portfolio. Just that there is great writing aimed at an indie niche, and great (accessible) writing aimed at a wider audience.

If you want a little of the former kind of writing in your portfolio, this is fine (especially if drizzled throughout, or featured primarily in lore or item description sections), but you need to make sure you can demonstrate your ability to write scenes where it's very clear what's happening if you want to get jobs on more commercially-oriented projects. This may mean many different things depending on your body of work, but in the following section, I'll set up a few writing types which are great to demonstrate for this purpose.

If you are uncomfortable doing much of this sort of writing - heavily dialogue-driven scenes; accessible character-driven dialogue that also communicates gameplay objectives and goals; conversations with limited scope for interactivity - you may need to ask yourself whether a career in writing games freelance for other companies is for you, or if you'd be better suited primarily developing your own games (with perhaps a limited amount of freelance work and consulting for projects which do fit your particular interests and design aesthetic).

All of these skills can be learned to various degrees, however, if you've got a decent level of writing ability in general - so don't despair if you're trying to write in this way and have not succeeded yet. The sentiment of 'consider if this is the right path for you' is more aimed at those who feel they actively dislike the kinds of writing I'm advising here, or who may view themselves as somehow above it.

A LINEAR BUT ENTIRELY DIALOGUE DRIVEN CONVERSATION OF ABOUT A PAGE, WITH VERY FEW STAGE DIRECTIONS IF ANY

This may even resemble a film or TV-style script. You want to demonstrate your ability to execute character-driven cinematic dialogue well. It's a fallacy to assume game studios are only looking for interactive dialogue - only around 50% of my game writing gigs involve this, and it's a good idea to demonstrate skills agnostic from a particular branching dialogue method regardless of the role.

By barks, I'm referring to one-line dialogue (often repeated) that usually occurs outside of the main storyline and populates the game world in order to support various gameplay features. The archetypal bark can be found in first person shooter games: "Grenade!", "Get down!", "Reloading!" etc, but may also be found in one-liners from NPCs or any number of gameplay systems. When you select someone on a Character Select screen, for example, and the character says a little phase, this is a bark.

Barks can be exceptionally difficult to write despite their apparent simplicity, as often such writing requires dozens or even hundreds of variants to account for the many, many times players will encounter such lines in gameplay. It's great to demonstrate half a page to a page of such lines to show that you're able to carry out this essential task.

(As a bonus component for your portfolio: item descriptions would also fit quite well!)

A LORE ENTRY / SOME PROSE OF SOME KIND. HALF A PAGE MAX PER GAME

[-UNLESS- YOU ARE APPLYING FOR AN INTERACTIVE FICTION GAME, IN WHICH CASE ATTACH A 2-3 PAGE SAMPLE + A PLAYABLE TWINE DEMO]

Despite what I said above, there is a place for your flowing prose writing in these game writing portfolios, just not a) for the majority of applications, and b) in limited form when appropriate. Lore entries, in-game journals, letters, etc are a great way of demonstrating these skills, but try to select passages which are exciting or intriguing in some sort of way, and which do not run over half a page per game (and in a 10 page portfolio, I wouldn't have more than one or two instances of this sort of material). You want to give the people reviewing your writing a chance to engage with your material, and if the prose section is too long, even if it's great, you're just going to slow them down.

D) A BRANCHING DIALOGUE CONVERSATION WHICH DOESN'T BRANCH TOO MUCH:

As explained above, you want to highlight your ability to write interactive dialogue but you do not want to suggest such interactivity will heavily increase the complexity and scope of what the studio in question is trying to produce. Maybe feature a choice every 5 lines or so, not too complex, just showing a branch in the conversation that then joins in on itself - i.e. a choice to be happy, sad, or angry about something, which leads to variant sets of 5 lines or so, all of which join up at the same point and become a unified linear conversation once more for a period of time. If you do feature a major moral choice in your writing sample, this is great, but try and either do so in a way where the ramifications of that choice would be delayed or where it comes late in the sample.

I'D ADVISE FEATURING DIFFERENT TYPES OF GAMES FROM DIFFERENT GENRES

If you haven't created them, keep participating in game jams and in interactive fiction projects as I recommended in the articles linked above, and take your samples from both until you can replace them with professional portfolios. If you can demonstrate well-written variety, you show your flexibility and your ability to participate in a number of projects.

You should, if possible, target the writing samples you send for particular applications towards the kind of writing that project would need (i.e. if it's comedy, send mostly comedy samples; if existential space sci-fi tragedy, then forms of writing which relate to this in turn!). However, it can still be a good idea to send additional samples if you can from other projects in order to demonstrate your ability to write in diverse ways. Especially if these samples just present particularly good instances of quality writing.